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Future Impact now available!! WAS: deep impact reissue!!! interested?

#8,021
Been having ALLOT of fun with the FI controlling the Moog Matriarch. Having those tones on the bass strings has been a dream, I can loose hours on just a few patches.

I’ve tried to capture the “tracker tone” by carefully playing arpeggios and then triggering the same with midi and they sound near identical, confirmed this by zooming in on the recorded waveforms. After spending several hours enjoying the system I’ve come to realize if you play accurately and employ muted rests in between notes the tracking is as good as using a keyboard. Avoiding dead notes and large pitch jumps also helps. My faster lead lines without rests still result in some strange pitching effects that I described earlier as “tracker tone”, I think this may be caused by insufficient muting on my part when playing with speed. I’ll try some foam at the bridge to see what happens.

I must say, I’m pretty satisfied with this set up. It’s not perfect but it’s great, and the next level up for controlling a synth with a bass would be a $4k Rob O’Reilly bass.
 
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#8,022
OhulahanBass said:
Been having ALLOT of fun with the FI controlling the Moog Matriarch. Having those tones on the bass strings has been a dream, I can loose hours on just a few patches.

I’ve tried to capture the “tracker tone” by carefully playing arpeggios and then triggering the same with midi and they sound near identical, confirmed this by zooming in on the recorded waveforms. After spending several hours enjoying the system I’ve come to realize if you play accurately and employ muted rests in between notes the tracking is as good as using a keyboard. Avoiding dead notes and large pitch jumps also helps. My faster lead lines without rests still result in some strange pitching effects that I described earlier as “tracker tone”, I think this may be caused by insufficient muting on my part when playing with speed. I’ll try some foam at the bridge to see what happens.

I must say, I’m pretty satisfied with this set up. It’s not perfect but it’s great, and the next level up for controlling a synth with a bass would be a $4k Rob O’Reilly bass.
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Great report, I am still in my getting to know her phase with the FIv4 but loving the results and sounds so far. Anxious to try it with my B2600 and considering a Solina String Ensemble as my next purchase to pair with the CV/Gate cable. .
 
#8,023
OhulahanBass said:
I’ve come to realize if you play accurately and employ muted rests in between notes the tracking is as good as using a keyboard. Avoiding dead notes and large pitch jumps also helps.
Click to expand...
All of which I think I mention in the manual. :-)
 
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#8,026
With mutes and accurate clean play I think I have reached the limits of tracking with the current firmware, which is great, the best I have ever experienced, but I think an added feature of glide could get rid of that final bit of "tracker tone."

Adjustable glide with constant rate or time in between latched notes could smooth out the pitch instability between fast notes or large jumps in pitch. Or not, perhaps there is a reason Panda back from offering glide in Bass mode.

Perhaps the market is too small, but I think a small pitch to CV box would be a rad product for Panda to offer. I feel like I am wasting the FI a bit using it primarily for Bass > CV but I have 3 delicious sounding knobby hardware synths I know from years of programming.
 
#8,027
OhulahanBass said:
With mutes and accurate clean play I think I have reached the limits of tracking with the current firmware, which is great, the best I have ever experienced, but I think an added feature of glide could get rid of that final bit of "tracker tone."

Adjustable glide with constant rate or time in between latched notes could smooth out the pitch instability between fast notes or large jumps in pitch. Or not, perhaps there is a reason Panda back from offering glide in Bass mode.

Perhaps the market is too small, but I think a small pitch to CV box would be a rad product for Panda to offer. I feel like I am wasting the FI a bit using it primarily for Bass > CV but I have 3 delicious sounding knobby hardware synths I know from years of programming.
Click to expand...
As said, you can turn on accuracy mode to remove pitch deviation.

Glide when triggering via audio is something I’ve asked for before and it could maybe be done. It’s not the same as MIDI glide; it would need to be a slew of some kind. My idea would be to tie it to he MIDI portamento slider to make it function the same for both audio and MIDI mode.
 
#8,028
Quatschmacher said:
As said, you can turn on accuracy mode to remove pitch deviation.

Glide when triggering via audio is something I’ve asked for before and it could maybe be done. It’s not the same as MIDI glide; it would need to be a slew of some kind. My idea would be to tie it to he MIDI portamento slider to make it function the same for both audio and MIDI mode.
Click to expand...

Access to MIDI glide/portamento was definitely one of the reasons I invested in the MIDI bass. Do you think that variable keyboard tracking could be added as a MIDI feature even if audio tracking is a non-starter?
 
#8,029
Kiwigrass said:
Access to MIDI glide/portamento was definitely one of the reasons I invested in the MIDI bass. Do you think that variable keyboard tracking could be added as a MIDI feature even if audio tracking is a non-starter?
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I’ve asked about variable keyboard tracking but I think the maths might be a bit tricky.

In the meantime, you can route pitch to cutoff via a flexi and set it however you want.
 
#8,032
Quatschmacher said:
As said, you can turn on accuracy mode to remove pitch deviation.

Glide when triggering via audio is something I’ve asked for before and it could maybe be done. It’s not the same as MIDI glide; it would need to be a slew of some kind. My idea would be to tie it to he MIDI portamento slider to make it function the same for both audio and MIDI mode.
Click to expand...

I exclusively use accuracy mode, it doesn't eliminate the pitching effect on all triggers, especially fast changing ones. If this could be smoothed out in a groovy way with glide it would go from great to excelent IMHO.
 
#8,033
Finally managed to hook up Gaz Williams with the Panda guys. Look out for some interesting video explorations in the near future.
IMG_9666.jpeg
 
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#8,034
postrockrocks said:
Tracking with the FI is not really fast but just ok. If you play fast songs such as Hysteria by Muse, I find it difficult to maintain perfect timing because the response is slow(tried all of the presets). Editing is also cumbersome, you need 2 midi cables and an audio interface to audition and save sounds. FI will work for you if you find a preset or sound that you like then you use it as it is. Editing using onboard controls is very difficult, there is little information visible because of the limitation of the display. Overall, C4 is a better option because eventhough it has fewer sounds, you can fine tune the sounds easily (you just need a usb cable) and tracking is superior.
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Quatschmacher said:
Did you have a v3 previously? If not, I’d venture that you need to spend a bit of time learning to “play the pedal” as mentioned in the manual. It does take a bit of time to dial in the best combination of input, note-on and note-off levels for any given instrument. Certain setups (strings, string height, pickup configuration, tone settings) work better than others. There is also an element of adapting one’s technique a bit to feed the pitch detection circuit clean lines. Key to this is careful attention to muting the previous note before striking the next. Once this has been achieved, the FI responds really quickly. (You mentioned Muse earlier; Chris Wolstenholme has used the Deep Inpact and Future Impact for years.)
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To be fair, Chris never used the Deep Impact/Future Impact for this song in the first place. He just used his classic Big Muff/Animato combination he's know for. Rich Costly, their producer at the time, is the one who added the synth sound using a Hollywood level sound design engine called Kyma that combines two sounds together to create something new. So he took the what Chris recorded and the sound of a synth, and then the Kyma system took the recorded riff and applied the character of the synth on top of it, which resulted in the sound we all now know. It wasn't real-time tracking. It wasn't a sequencer. It was all post-process sound design computing/Hollywood magic.

Still doesn't mean I'm ever going to stop chasing it until I can find something that does work in real-time.
 
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#8,037
Filter was wide open but I haven’t tried the BPF though…thx for the tip. I did do some PW modulation on a narrow pulse with some nice effect.

I mostly use a single saw or pulse but I can get into some vocoder territory with 3 saws tuned in octaves or 5ths.
 

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